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After recent new S-election of President of Islamic Republic in Iran, I remembered an article which was written by Jacob G. Hornberger, Posted June 28, 2004 that I found very interesting and it was about situation surrounding Hitler at the time and how he became what we now know the worst thing that recent history would permit us to remember.

What made this so interesting is the fact that for the first time after Islamist Revolution in Iran, the government has became one entity, the Army has most of the power and they are shaping so rapidly.

It became so obvious since the closure of the newly built airport in Iran some times on May, 2004 by the revolutionary guards which surprised many even the supreme leader Ayatoolah Khamenie.

Iran as we know it is going to make itself isolated and soon they would follow North Korea and perhaps that is their final frontier to keep themselves alive.

The big question is what are we willing to do to stop such a madness? Can we afford to wait and see Tyrant regime get hold of the Nuclear Technology and then deal with it?

Please read the article and look at the similarities in many aspects, remember we can not write the history so many different ways and most the time history has repeatedly has repeated itself.

Enthusiastically,
Alex Agahi

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How Hitler Became a Dictator

by Jacob G. Hornberger, Posted June 28, 2004

Whenever U.S. officials wish to demonize someone, they inevitably compare him to Adolf Hitler. The message immediately resonates with people because everyone knows that Hitler was a brutal dictator.

But how many people know how Hitler actually became a dictator? My bet is, very few. I’d also bet that more than a few people would be surprised at how he pulled it off, especially given that after World War I Germany had become a democratic republic.

The story of how Hitler became a dictator is set forth in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer, on which this article is based.

In the presidential election held on March 13, 1932, there were four candidates: the incumbent, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler, and
two minor candidates, Ernst Thaelmann and Theodore Duesterberg. The results were:
Hindenburg 49.6 percent
Hitler 30.1 percent
Thaelmann 13.2 percent
Duesterberg 6.8 percent

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, almost 70 percent of the German
people voted against Hitler, causing his supporter Joseph Goebbels, who
would later become Hitler’s minister of propaganda, to lament in his journal, “We’re beaten; terrible outlook. Party circles badly depressed and
dejected.”

Since Hindenberg had not received a majority of the vote, however, a runoff election had to be held among the top three vote-getters. On April 19, 1932, the runoff results were:

Hindenburg 53.0 percent
Hitler 36.8 percent
Thaelmann 10.2 percent

Thus, even though Hitler’s vote total had risen, he still had been
decisively rejected by the German people.
On June 1, 1932, Hindenberg appointed Franz von Papen as chancellor of
Germany, whom Shirer described as an “unexpected and ludicrous figure.” Papen immediately dissolved the Reichstag (the national congress) and called for new elections, the third legislative election in five months.
Hitler and his fellow members of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, who
were determined to bring down the republic and establish dictatorial rule in Germany, did everything they could to create chaos in the streets, including initiating political violence and murder. The situation got so bad that martial law was proclaimed in Berlin.

Even though Hitler had badly lost the presidential election, he was drawing
ever-larger crowds during the congressional election. As Shirer points out,
In one day, July 27, he spoke to 60,000 persons in Brandenburg, to nearly as many in Potsdam, and that evening to 120,000 massed in the giant Grunewald Stadium in Berlin while outside an additional 100,000 heard his voice by loudspeaker.

Hitler’s rise to power

The July 31, 1932, election produced a major victory for Hitler’s National
Socialist Party. The party won 230 seats in the Reichstag, making it Germany ’s largest political party, but it still fell short of a majority in the
608-member body.

On the basis of that victory, Hitler demanded that President Hindenburg
appoint him chancellor and place him in complete control of the state. Otto von Meissner, who worked for Hindenburg, later testified at Nuremberg, Hindenburg replied that because of the tense situation he could not in good conscience risk transferring the power of government to a new party such as the National Socialists, which did not command a majority and which was intolerant, noisy and undisciplined.

Political deadlocks in the Reichstag soon brought a new election, this one
in November 6, 1932. In that election, the Nazis lost two million votes and
34 seats. Thus, even though the National Socialist Party was still the
largest political party, it had clearly lost ground among the voters.

Attempting to remedy the chaos and the deadlocks, Hindenburg fired Papen and appointed an army general named Kurt von Schleicher as the new German chancellor. Unable to secure a majority coalition in the Reichstag, however, Schleicher finally tendered his resignation to Hindenburg, 57 days after he had been appointed.

On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Although the National Socialists never captured more than 37 percent of the national vote, and even though they still held a minority of cabinet posts and fewer than 50 percent of the seats in the Reichstag, Hitler and the Nazis set out to to consolidate their power. With Hitler as chancellor, that proved to be a fairly easy task.

The Reichstag fire

On February 27, Hitler was enjoying supper at the Goebbels home when thetelephone rang with an emergency message: “The Reichstag is on fire!” Hitler and Goebbels rushed to the fire, where they encountered Hermann Goering, who would later become Hitler’s air minister. Goering was shouting at the top of his lungs, This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very day be strung up.

The day after the fire, the Prussian government announced that it had found communist publications stating, Government buildings, museums, mansions and essential plants were to be burned down... . Women and children were to be sent in front of terrorist groups.... The burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloody insurrection and civil war.... It has been ascertained that today was to have seen throughout Germany terrorist acts against individual persons,

against private property, and against the life and limb of the peaceful population, and also the beginning of general civil war.

So how was Goering so certain that the fire had been set by communist terrorists? Arrested on the spot was a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe. Most historians now believe that van der Lubbe was actually duped by the Nazis into setting the fire and probably was even assisted by them, without his realizing it.

Why would Hitler and his associates turn a blind eye to an impending terrorist attack on their national congressional building or actually assist with such a horrific deed? Because they knew what government officials have known throughout history — that during extreme national emergencies, people are most scared and thus much more willing to surrender their liberties in return for “security.” And that’s exactly what happened during the Reichstag terrorist crisis.

Suspending civil liberties

The day after the fire, Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to issue a decree entitled, “For the Protection of the People and the State.” Justified as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree suspended the constitutional guarantees pertaining to civil liberties:

Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free _expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searches, orders for
confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible
beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

Two weeks after the Reichstag fire, Hitler requested the Reichstag to temporarily delegate its powers to him so that he could adequately deal with the crisis. Denouncing opponents to his request, Hitler shouted, “Germany will be free, but not through you!” When the vote was taken, the result was 441 for and 84 against, giving Hitler the two-thirds majority he needed to suspend the German constitution. On March 23, 1933, what has gone down in German history as the “Enabling Act” made Hitler dictator of Germany, freed of all legislative and constitutional constraints.

The judiciary under Hitler

One of the most dramatic consequences was in the judicial arena. Shirer points out, Under the Weimar Constitution judges were independent, subject only to the law, protected from arbitrary removal and bound at least in theory by Article 109 to safeguard equality before the law.

In fact, in the Reichstag terrorist case, while the court convicted van der Lubbe of the crime (who was executed), three other defendants, all communists, were acquitted, which infuriated Hitler and Goering. Within a
month, the Nazis had transferred jurisdiction over treason cases from the
Supreme Court to a new People’s Court, which, as Shirer points out, soon became the most dreaded tribunal in the land. It consisted of two professional judges and five others chosen from among party officials, the S.S. and the armed forces, thus giving the latter a majority vote. There was no appeal from its decisions or sentences and usually its sessions were held

in camera. Occasionally, however, for propaganda purposes when relatively light sentences were to be given, the foreign correspondents were invited to attend.

One of the Reichstag terrorist defendants, who had angered Goering during the trial with a severe cross-examination of Goering, did not benefit from his acquittal. Shirer explains:

The German communist leader was immediately taken into “protective custody,” where he remained until his death during the second war.

In addition to the People’s Court, which handled treason cases, the Nazis also set up the Special Court, which handled cases of political crimes or “insidious attacks against the government.” These courts

consisted of three judges, who invariably had to be trusted party members, without a jury. A Nazi prosecutor had the choice of bringing action in such cases before either an ordinary court or the Special Court, and invariably he chose the latter, for obvious reasons. Defense lawyers before this court, as before the Volksgerichtshof, had to be approved by Nazi officials.

Sometimes even if they were approved they fared badly. Thus the lawyers who attempted to represent the widow of Dr. Klausener, the Catholic Action
leader murdered in the Blood Purge, in her suit for damages against the

State were whisked off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until they formally withdrew the action.
Even lenient treatment by the Special Court was no guarantee for the defendant, however, as Pastor Martin Niemoeller discovered when he was

acquitted of major political charges and sentenced to time served for minor charges. Leaving the courtroom, Niemoeller was taken into custody by the Gestapo and taken to a concentration camp.

The Nazis also implemented a legal concept called Schutzhaft or “protective custody” which enabled them to arrest and incarcerate people without charging them with a crime. As Shirer put it,

Protective custody did not protect a man from possible harm, as it did in
more civilized countries. It punished him by putting him behind barbed wire.

On August 2, 1934, Hindenburg died, and the title of president was abolished. Hitler’s title became Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor. Not surprisingly, he used the initial four-year “temporary” grant of emergency
powers that had been given to him by the Enabling Act to consolidate his omnipotent control over the entire country.

Accepting the new order

Oddly enough, even though his dictatorship very quickly became complete, Hitler returned to the Reichstag every four years to renew the “temporary” delegation of emergency powers that it had given him to deal with the Reichstag-arson crisis. Needless to say, the Reichstag rubber-stamped each of his requests. For their part, the German people quickly accepted the new order of things.

Keep in mind that the average non-Jewish German was pretty much unaffected by the new laws and decrees. As long as a German citizen kept his head down, worked hard, took care of his family, sent his children to the public schools and the Hitler Youth organization, and, most important, didn’t involve himself in political dissent against the government, a visit by the Gestapo was very unlikely.

Keep in mind also that, while the Nazis established concentration camps in the 1930s, the number of inmates ranged in the thousands. It wouldn’t be until the 1940s that the death camps and the gas chambers that killed
millions would be implemented. Describing how the average German adapted to the new order, Shirer writes, The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation.... The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed.... On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. Send him email.

This was the typical reaction of most Iranians a day after the first round of presidential elections in Iran, when they heard that the two candidates facing each other in the run-off were veteran politician Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the little-known, ultra-conservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Last week’s surprise was all forgotten by the much bigger shock on Friday, when Ahmadinejad defeated the former President and iconic figure in the ruling theocracy in a landslide victory that consolidated power in the hands of the ruling Islamic clerics.

With spotlights now trained on the small, bearded figure in a trademark dilapidated grey suit, Ahmadinejad’s murky past is causing deep anxiety in Iran and growing concern abroad over the new President’s policies and orientation.

Born in the desert town of Garmsar, east of Tehran, in 1956, Ahmadinejad was the fourth child of a working class family with seven children. His father, who was a blacksmith, moved the family to Tehran when Ahmadinejad was barely a year old. He was brought up in the rough neighbourhoods of south Tehran, where a cocktail of poverty, frustration and xenophobia in the heydays of the Shah’s elitist regime provided fertile grounds for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

After finishing high school, Ahmadinejad went to Elm-o Sanaat University in 1975 to study engineering. Soon the whirlwind of Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept him from the classroom to the mosque and he joined a generation of firebrand Islamic fundamentalists dedicated to the cause of an Islamic world revolution.

Student activists in Elm-o Sanaat University at the time of the Iranian revolution were dominated by ultra-conservative Islamic fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad soon became one of their leaders and founded the Islamic Students Association in that university after the fall of the Shah’s regime.

In 1979, he became the representative of Elm-o Sanaat students in the Office for Strengthening of Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries, which later became known as the OSU. The OSU was set up by Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, who was at the time Khomeini’s top confidant and a key figure in the clerical leadership. Beheshti wanted the OSU to organise Islamist students to counter the rapidly rising influence of the opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK) among university students.

The OSU played a central role in the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Members of the OSU central council, who included Ahmadinejad as well as Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, Mohsen (Mahmoud) Mirdamadi, Mohsen Kadivar, Mohsen Aghajari, and Abbas Abdi, were regularly received by Khomeini himself.

According to other OSU officials, when the idea of storming the U.S. embassy in Tehran was raised in the OSU central committee by Mirdamadi and Abdi, Ahmadinejad suggested storming the Soviet embassy at the same time. A decade later, most OSU leaders re-grouped around Khatami but Ahmadinejad remained loyal to the ultra-conservatives.

During the crackdown on universities in 1980, which Khomeini called the “Islamic Cultural Revolution”, Ahmadinejad and the OSU played a critical role in purging dissident lecturers and students many of whom were arrested and later executed. Universities remained closed for three years and Ahmadinejad joined the Revolutionary Guards.

In the early 1980s, Ahmadinejad worked in the “Internal Security” department of the IRGC and earned notoriety as a ruthless interrogator and torturer. According to the state-run website Baztab, allies of outgoing President Mohammad Khatami have revealed that Ahmadinejad worked for some time as an executioner in the notorious Evin Prison, where thousands of political prisoners were executed in the bloody purges of the 1980s.

In 1986, Ahmadinejad became a senior officer in the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards and was stationed in Ramazan Garrison near Kermanshah in western Iran. Ramazan Garrison was the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards’ “extra-territorial operations”, a euphemism for terrorist attacks beyond Iran’s borders.

In Kermanshah, Ahmadinejad became involved in the clerical regime’s terrorist operations abroad and led many “extra-territorial operations of the IRGC”. With the formation of the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the IRGC, Ahmadinejad became one of its senior commanders. He was the mastermind of a series of assassinations in the Middle East and Europe, including the assassination of Iranian Kurdish leader Abdorrahman Qassemlou, who was shot dead by senior officers of the Revolutionary Guards in a Vienna flat in July 1989. Ahmadinejad was a key planner of the attack, according to sources in the Revolutionary Guards.

Ahmadinejad served for four years as the governor of the towns of Maku and Khoy in northwestern Iran. In 1993, he was appointed by Minister of Islamic Culture and Guidance Ali Larijani, a fellow officer of the Revolutionary Guards, as his cultural adviser. Months later, he was appointed as the governor of the newly-created Ardebil Province.

In 1997, the newly-installed Khatami administration removed Ahmadinejad from his post and he returned to Elm-o Sanaat University to teach, but his principal activity was to organize Ansar-e Hezbollah, a radical gang of violent Islamic vigilantes.

Since becoming mayor of Tehran in April 2003, Ahmadinejad has been using his position to build up a strong network of radical Islamic fundamentalists organised as “Abadgaran-e Iran-e Islami” (literally, Developers of an Islamic Iran). Working in close conjunction with the Revolutionary Guard’s, Abadgaran was able to win the municipal elections in 2003 and the parliamentary election in 2004. They owed their victories as much to low turnouts and general disillusionment with the “moderate” faction of the regime as to their well-oiled political and military machinery.

Abadgaran bills itself as a group of young neo-Islamic fundamentalists who want to revive the ideals and policies of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini. It was one of several ultra-conservative groups that were setup on the orders of Ayatollah Khamenei in order to defeat outgoing President Mohammad Khatami’s faction after the parliamentary elections in February 2000.

Ahmadinejad’s record is typical of the men chosen by Khamenei’s entourage to put a new face on the clerical elite’s ultra-conservative identity. But beyond the shallow façade, few doubt that the Islamic Republic under its new President will move with greater speed and determination along the path of radical policies that include more human rights abuses, continuing sponsorship of terrorism, and the drive to obtain nuclear weapons.

TEHRAN -- Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Sunday appointed the commander of a conservative militia as the new chief of the national police force, the Iranian Student News Agency reported. The new chief, Brig. Gen. Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam, 44, will replace Muhammad Baqer Qalibaf, who resigned to run for president in last month's election.

General Ahmadi Moghadam is the commander in Tehran of the Basij, a conservative volunteer militia that is a branch of the Revolutionary Guards and that has taken part in a crackdown against pro-democracy protests. He is also a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guards. The Basij, whose members supported Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative candidate who won the presidency, uses the vast network of mosques around the country as its organizational base.

Two other presidential candidates, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mehdi Karroubi, accused the Revolutionary Guards and Basij of using their influence to press Iranians to vote for Mr. Ahmadinejad.

In a letter on Sunday, Mr. Karroubi urged the departing president, Mohammad Khatami, to disclose what he called "election irregularities" to the public. Mr. Khatami has said he will give the judiciary a file about accusations of irregularities.

Ayatollah Khamenei said in his order appointing General Ahmadi Moghadam that he was being chosen because of his "revolutionary record and his past services in military and security positions," the student news agency reported.

The general in the eight-year war with Iraq that ended in 1988. Political analysts had warned that the election of Mr. Ahmadinejad could bring a wave of repression against political and social freedoms allowed since the election of Mr. Khatami, a reformist, in 1997. Conservatives control Iran's judiciary, and they gained control of Parliament after a conservative monitoring body barred reformist politicians from running in the last election

"The process of consolidation in which the great states of the earth are involved at the moment is for us the last warning signal to stop and search our hearts, to lead our people out of the dream world back to hard reality, and show them the way to the future which alone will lead the old Reich to a new golden age.

"And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last we break of the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.

"If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states."

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.

The above excerpt - from a book which still enjoys a frighteningly broad readership throughout the Islamic world - was written in 1924, while Hitler was still an inmate in Landsberg Prison. Mein Kampf ("my struggle") was the distilled vision of a young man who was determined to rise to the very top of his nation's political hierarchy. Once there, it was his intention to do precisely everything he'd diplomatically undertaken not to do. The assurances he'd made to foreign powers, the agreements and treaties he committed his nation to were mere ploys in order to buy time, so that Germany might rearm, and regain territory lost to them at the conclusion of the First World War.

Hitler's blitzkrieg war upon first western, then central and eastern Europe came as a surprise to those who thought diplomacy and appeasement had triumphed. But as anyone could have seen, even decades before the war had started, Hitler's true aim, his real vision for the destiny of the German Volk, was not in peaceful coexistence with their neighbors, but in a violent expansionism; especially to the east, into the fertile fields of Russia. It was all there, in Mein Kampf, for all to see. Right from the start.

That is the thing with megalomaniacal, totalitarian leaders. They almost universally believe themselves to be chosen men, destinied to lead their people on a grand quest toward eternal glory. And try though they might to be subtle, to be discrete, to conceal their plans from unhelpful scrutiny, they are just so utterly wrapped up in their own magnificent cleverness that they can't help but reveal their master plan beforehand.

I am now talking about the Iranian leader, President Mahmood Ahmadinejad. Like Hitler, he has made many entreaties to the west, using every trick in the fascist handbook in order to buy time. He knows that in dealing primarily with today's France and Germany, he is dealing with the same kind of weak, vaccilating liberal leadership Hitler had to contend with in France and Britain of the 1940s. He has little to fear from them, or their feeble UN motions that lead nowhere. However, in those seldom instances when it does look as though something solid might actually be brought against Iran before the UN Security Council, what do the Iranians do? They suddenly make concessions. Concessions which draw out the negotiations. Negotiations change to a sick, embarrassing game, as Iran first feigns cooperation, then suddenly switches to making ridiculous, impossible demands of the EU and the UN's toothless nuclear watchdog, the IAEA. Eventually, the entire process begins again. No inspections have taken place. Nothing has been achieved, except by Iran. In that time, months have elapsed. Months you can be sure the Iranians have put to excellent use in their uranium enrichment plant near Isfahan.

But if Ahmadinejad was like Hitler only in terms of his ability to stall, there would be little comparison to be drawn at all. The trouble is, he's also very much like Hitler in the sense that he believes himself to be a man of destiny, out to win a glorious triumph for his Volk (or the Ummah - whichever you prefer.)

Happily for us, he also suffers from Hitler's appalling inability to keep quiet about his own brilliance:

In the first such statement by an Iranian president in nearly 20 years, Mahmood Ahmadinejad said his election would mark what he termed a new Islamic revolution. Ahmadinejad said such a revolution would spread throughout the world.

"Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution of 1384 [the current Iranian year] will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world," Ahmadinejad was quoted by the official Iranian news agency as saying. "The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes, tyranny and injustice has reached its end."

Like Hitler's references to the valiant eastward destiny of Aryan man, Ahmadinejad's words here can only be construed as alluding to the precise opposite of every diplomatic gesture he has made, especially his declarations in regard to nuclear weapons. He has claimed that while Iran has a "right" to nuclear energy technology, it has no intention of manufacturing nuclear weapons. How noble those Mullahs are, to go to this much trouble to provide their people with slightly cheaper electricity.

In contradiction to this, in the above statement he is openly indicating that it is his government's aim to be able to develop nuclear weapons, so as to be able to harken in the new "Iranian Revolution" and "cut off the roots of injustice in the world". The roots of injustice, as Iranians see them, stem from two sources alone. America and the Jews. The "world" he is referring to so altruistically is, of course, the Muslim world, the only world in which Muslims are even slightly interested.

But it is his final words that are most telling. "The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes, tyranny and injustice has reached its end." It's fairly clear that he isn't talking about the Swiss in this passage. Making the safe assumption that he is in fact talking about the "Great Satan" as the Iranians calmly labelled the United States, then what is it that he imagines will cause the Americans to lose their power so suddenly, and prevent them from going about their normal, dastardly routine of oppression, tyranny and injustice?

Iran is surrounded by a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Iraq.

Only a nuclear-equipped Iran will secure the Mullah's regime, and they know it.

If the world through the UN believes the painfully transparent lies of this posturing boob, and allows him to see his dream through to fruition, then we deserve a nuclear Iran, and all of the misery that will most certainly accompany it.

the similarities between rise of fascism in Germany and rise of Islamo-fascism are scary. as if the natzi modeled this one after their own legend. it's like they've trained them to exactly duplicate the same model to the minutest details.

yet, it's sad how the world was completely ignoring it as it was happening point for point in Iran. and to this day, no one really admits the forces behind revival of fascism in its new islamic form.

if not dealt with effectively, fascism will be able to reinvent itself yet again._________________Paayande Iran

Merkel: Iran had crossed a red line
As the vote on the resolution was taking place, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned at the annual Munich security conference that the world must act and not be complacent.

"Looking back to German history in the early 1930s when National Socialism was on the rise, there were many outside Germany who said, 'It's only rhetoric -- don't get excited'," Reuters quotes Merkel as saying.

She said that Iran and Ahmadinejad had crossed a "red line."

"I say it as German chancellor," she said, according to Reuters. "A president who questions Israel's right to exist, a president who denies the Holocaust cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany."

Merkel: Iran had crossed a red line
As the vote on the resolution was taking place, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned at the annual Munich security conference that the world must act and not be complacent.

"Looking back to German history in the early 1930s when National Socialism was on the rise, there were many outside Germany who said, 'It's only rhetoric -- don't get excited'," Reuters quotes Merkel as saying.

She said that Iran and Ahmadinejad had crossed a "red line."

"I say it as German chancellor," she said, according to Reuters. "A president who questions Israel's right to exist, a president who denies the Holocaust cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany."

Thank you for this important post, Ms. Merkel's statement regarding looking back to German history in the early 1930s is confirming Alex Agahi's comments.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, compared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Adolf Hitler yesterday as Tehran vowed to resume the enrichment of uranium which could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Amid growing fears that the Iranians are intent on acquiring an “Islamic bomb”, Merkel warned that the world must not repeat the mistakes it made in appeasing the Nazis.

“Looking back to German history in the early 1930s when National Socialism was on the rise, there were many outside Germany who said, ‘It’s only rhetoric — don’t get excited’,” Merkel told an international security conference in Munich.

“There were times when people could have reacted differently and, in my view, Germany is obliged to do something at the early stages,” she added. “We want to, we must prevent Iran from developing its nuclear programme.”

Merkel issued a blunt warning to Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”.

“Iran has blatantly crossed the red line,” she said. “I say it as a German chancellor. A president who questions Israel’s right to exist, a president who denies the Holocaust cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany.”

The statement came as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations nuclear watchdog, voted overwhelmingly in Vienna to report Iran to the

Iran responded by announcing that it would resume “commercial-scale” enrichment of uranium, the fuel for power plants or bombs, which was suspended in 2004. Ahmadinejad later ordered an end to spot checks by IAEA inspectors from today.

Tehran described as “dead” a compromise brokered by the Kremlin under which Russia would enrich uranium for Iran to the purity required for nuclear power but not weapons. Moscow insisted the deal was still on the table.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA described the vote — carried by 27 to three, with five abstentions — as a “historic mistake” and insisted his country would press on with its nuclear programme.

“We don’t want confrontation but we can tolerate some problems for the sake of principles that we are committed to,” he told The Sunday Times.

Soltanieh said it was not clear when enrichment would begin. In an apparent sign of confusion in Tehran an Iranian news agency which had said Ahmadinejad had given the order to start, immediately withdrew its report last night.

The escalation in the stand-off with Iran, the world’s fourth largest oil producer, seemed certain to drive energy prices higher on the markets tomorrow.

It will also raise fears that Tehran might respond by increasing support for militant Islamic groups in the Middle East, of which it is already a major financial backer.

Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, backed the German leader’s call for tougher action and accused Iran of being “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism”.

Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar, his Iranian counterpart, rejected the charges as “ridiculous”.

It nevertheless postponed discussion of the issue at the Security Council until next month to give Iran a last chance to climb down. But the vehemence of Tehran’s initial reaction made this look unlikely.

It will now be up to the Security Council to decide what further action to take. It is expected to start by making a so-called “presidential statement” reinforcing the IAEA’s demands.

Diplomats said any tougher action, such as sanctions, were further down the line and would depend on Iran’s behaviour. China, a permanent member of the Security Council, opposes sanctions.

Calls for stronger measures were growing last night, however. At the Munich conference, the influential American senator John McCain said the military option could not be ruled out if diplomatic efforts failed to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb. “Every option must remain on the table,” he said. “There’s only one thing worse than military action, that is a nuclear armed Iran.”

The IRGC’s spokesman, Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri, told the Persian-language website Hemaseh, “The way Europe is dealing with the case of Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy program shows the weaknesses and uselessness of countries such as Britain, France, and Germany. This weakness is in particular clearly noticeable in speeches by newcomers such as the German Chancellor”.

“Merkel in her childish dreams imagines herself as Hitler and therefore thinks that now that she is leaning against the Chancellorship’s chair she can give orders to the world and free countries”, Jazayeri said.

“From individuals who have a Zionist background nothing less is expected”, the IRGC spokesman added.

In Munich on Saturday, Merkel compared hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler.

Commenting on Iran’s likely intent to acquire nuclear weapons, Merkel said that the world must not repeat the mistakes it made in appeasing the Nazis.

“Looking back to German history in the early 1930s when National Socialism was on the rise, there were many outside Germany who said, ‘It’s only rhetoric — don’t get excited”, she said

“Iran has blatantly crossed the red line”, she added.

“I say this as a German chancellor, a president who questions Israel’s right to exist, a president who denies the Holocaust cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany.”

The IRGC’s spokesman, Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri, told the Persian-language website Hemaseh, “The way Europe is dealing with the case of Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy program shows the weaknesses and uselessness of countries such as Britain, France, and Germany. This weakness is in particular clearly noticeable in speeches by newcomers such as the German Chancellor”.

“Merkel in her childish dreams imagines herself as Hitler and therefore thinks that now that she is leaning against the Chancellorship’s chair she can give orders to the world and free countries”, Jazayeri said.

“From individuals who have a Zionist background nothing less is expected”, the IRGC spokesman added.

The way the IRI is dealing with the international community's concerns shows the weakness and uselessness of the regime's hypocracy.

Antar in his childish dreams of "mahdi sainthood" has become Hitler incarnate...reincarnated in Islamic form...and is leaning on the president's chair he was appointed to so he can give orders to the free world and free countries.

From individuals who have an IRI/Revolutionary Guard background nothing less can be expected.

It is easy to damn the 1930s appeasers of Hitler, given what the Nazis ultimately did when unleashed. But history demands not merely recognizing the truth post facto, but also trying to reconstruct the rationale of something that now in hindsight seems inexplicable.

Appeasement in the 1930s was popular with the European public for a variety of reasons. All of them are instructive in our hesitation about stopping a nuclear Iran, or about defending the right of Western newspapers to print what they wish--or about fighting radical Islamism in general.

First, Europe had nearly been destroyed during the Great War, a mere 20 years prior. No responsible postwar leader wished to risk a second continental bloodbath.

Unfortunately, Hitler understood that all too well. In a game of diplomatic chicken, he figured many responsible democratic statesmen had more to lose than he did, as the weaker and once-beaten enemy.

British intellectuals, like European Union idealists today, wrote books and treatises on the obsolescence of war. Winston Churchill was a voice in the wilderness--and demonized as a warmonger and worse.

The 50-year Cold War is over and Europe is at last free of burdensome military expenditure and the threat of global annihilation. Like Osama bin Laden, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad senses a certain weariness in much of the West as it counts on perpetual peace.

He assumes that most sober Westerners will do almost anything to avoid military confrontation to stop a potential threat--even though, unlike Hitler, Ahmadinejad not only promises to liquidate the Jews but reveals his method in advance by seeking nuclear weapons.

Some naive conservatives in prewar Europe thought the German and Italian fascists would prove a valuable bulwark against communism, and so could be politically finessed. So, too, it has been at times with Islamic fascism. Arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia was once seen as an inspired way of thwarting Soviet communist imperialism.

At the time of the Ayatollah Khomeini's homicidal fatwa against Salman Rushdie, religious conservative commentators from Patrick Buchanan to New York's Cardinal John O'Connor attacked Rushdie, rather than defend the Western right of free expression. In the 1930s, the doctrine of appeasement fobbed off responsibility for confronting fascism onto the League of Nations. France and England were quiet about the 1936 Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the German militarization of the Rhineland. They counted on multilateral action of the League, which issued plenty of edicts but marshaled few troops.

Likewise, the moral high ground today supposedly was to refer both the Iraqi and Iranian problems to the UN. But considering the oil-for-food scandals and Saddam Hussein's constant violations of UN resolutions, it is unlikely that the Iranian theocracy has much fear that the UN Security Council will thwart its uranium enrichment.

As fascism spread, France worked on fortifying its German border with the Maginot Line, Oxford undergraduates voted to refuse "in any circumstances to fight for king and country," and British newspapers decried the Treaty of Versailles for unduly punishing Germany. This was all long before the "no blood for oil" slogan and Al Gore in Saudi Arabia apologizing for the supposed American maltreatment of Arabs.

But deja vu pertains not just to us but our enemies as well. Like the Nazi romance of an exalted ancient Volk, the Islamists hearken back to a mythical purity, free of decadence brought on by Western liberalism.

Similarly, they feed off victimization--not just recent defeats, but centuries-old bitterness at the rise of the West. Their version of the stab-in-the-back Versailles Treaty is always the creation of Israel.

Just as Hitler concocted incidents such as the burning of the Reichstag to create outrage, Islamist leaders incite frenzy in their followers over a supposed flushed Koran at Guantanamo and inflammatory cartoons.

Anti-Semitism, of course, is the mother's milk of fascism. It is always, they say, a small group of Jews--whether shadowy Cabinet advisers and international bankers of the 1930s or the manipulative neoconservatives and Israeli leadership of the present--who alone stir up the trouble.

The point of the comparison is not to suggest that history simply repeats itself, but to learn why intelligent people delude themselves into embracing naive policies. After the removal of the Taliban and Hussein, the furious reply of the radical Islamist world was to censor Western newspapers, along with Iran's accelerated efforts to get the bomb.

In response, either the West will continue to stand up now to these reoccurring post-Sept. 11, 2001, threats, or it will see the bullies' demands only increase as its own resistance weakens. Like the appeasement of the 1930s, opting for the easier choice will only guarantee a more costly one later on.

Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University , a Professor Emeritus at California University , Fresno , and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

He was a full-time farmer before joining California State University , Fresno , in 1984 to initiate a classics program. In 1991, he was awarded an American Philological Association Excellence in Teaching Award, which is given yearly to the country's top undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin.

Hanson was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992-93), a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University (1991-92), a recipient of the Eric Breindel Award for opinion journalism (2002), and an Alexander Onassis Fellow (2001) and was named alumnus of the year of the University of California, Santa Cruz (2002). He was also the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis , Maryland (2002-3).

Hanson is the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, scholarly papers, and newspaper editorials on matters ranging from Greek, agrarian and military history to foreign affairs, domestic politics, and contemporary culture. He has written or edited 16 books, including Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (1983; paperback ed. University of California Press, 1998); The Western Way of War (Alfred Knopf, 1989; 2d paperback ed. University of California Press, 2000); Hoplites: The Ancient Greek Battle Experience (Routledge, 1991; paperback ed. 1992); The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (Free Press, 1995; 2d paperback ed. University of California Press, 2000); Fields without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea (Free Press, 1996; paperback ed. Touchstone, 1997); The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer (Free Press, 2000); The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (Cassell, 1999; paperback ed., 2001); The Soul of Battle (Free Press, 1999, paperback ed. Anchor/ Vintage, 2000); Carnage and Culture (Doubleday, 2001; Anchor/Vintage, 2002); An Autumn of War (Anchor/Vintage, 2002); Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (Encounter, 2003), Ripples of Battle (Doubleday 2003), and Between War and Peace (Random House 2004).

His newest book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House), was published in October 2005. Click here to read more about the book.

Hanson coauthored, with John Heath, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (Free Press, 1998; paperback ed. Encounter Press, 2000) and, with Bruce Thornton and John Heath, Bonfire of the Humanities (ISI Books, 2001).

Hanson has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, the New York Post, the Claremont Review of Books, The New Republic, National Review, American Heritage, Policy Review, Commentary, Wilson Quarterly, Weekly Standard, Daily Telegraph, and Washington Times and has been interviewed often on National Public Radio, the PBS Newshour, the Hugh Hewitt Show, and C-Span's BookTV. He serves on the editorial board of Arion, the Military History Quarterly, and City Journal.

In 2004, Hanson began a syndicated column for Tribune Media Services which appears in newspapers nationwide, and since 2001, he has written a weekly column for National Review Online.

Hanson was educated at the University of California , Santa Cruz (B.A. Classics, 1975), the American School of Classical Studies (1978-79) and received his Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University in 1980.

He lives and works with his family on their forty-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, California, where he was born in 1953.

May 20, 2006 -- WHILE Iran's economy appears to be heading for recession, one sector may have some reason for optimism. That sector is the garment industry and the reason for its optimism is a law passed by the Islamic Majlis (parliament) on Monday.

The law mandates the government to make sure that all Iranians wear "standard Islamic garments" designed to remove ethnic and class distinctions reflected in clothing, and to eliminate "the influence of the infidel" on the way Iranians, especially the young, dress.

It also envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct color schemes to make them identifiable in public. The new codes would enable Muslims to instantly recognize non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming najis" (unclean).

The new law, drafted during the presidency of Muhammad Khatami in 2004, had been blocked within the Majlis. That blockage, however, has been removed under pressure from Khatami's successor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The new law replaces the one passed in 1982 dealing with women's clothes. That law imposed the hijab and focused on the need to force women to cover their hair in public. The emphasis on hijab was based on the belief that women's hair emanates an "evil ray" that drives men "into lustful irrationality" and thus causes harm to Islam.

The new law cannot come into effect until consensus is reached on what constitutes "authentic Islamic attire."

The world's estimated 1.3 billion Muslims live in more than 180 different countries and dress in a bewilderingly large number of styles reflecting national, tribal, ethnic and folkloric traditions. The Ethnological Museum in Tehran shows that Iran itself is home to hundreds of different styles of clothing for men and women.

According to Ahmadinejad, the new Islamic uniforms will establish "visual equality" for Iranians as they prepare for the return of the Hidden Imam. A committee that consists of members from the Ministry of Islamic Orientation, the Ministry of Commerce and the Cultural Subcommittee of the Islamic Majlis is scheduled to propose the new uniforms by next autumn. These would then have to be approved by "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei before being imposed by law.

Although the final shape of the uniforms is yet to be established, there is consensus on a number of points. The idea of adopting an Arab-style robe (known as dishdash) for men has been rejected along with a proposal that men wear a form of turban.

"Iranians have always worn trousers," says Mostafa Pourhardani, minister of Islamic orientation. "Even when the ancient Greeks wore woman-style dresses with skirts, the Persians had trousers. We are not going to force Iranian men to do away with trousers, although they predate Islam." What men will wear on top is not clear yet.

Some Islamic experts want a kind of long, almost European-style jacket known as sardari and used in Iran for centuries. Others propose only a waistcoat.

On color schemes, however, there seems to be consensus. Islamic legislators are unanimous that Islam is incompatible with "gay, wild, provocative colors" such as red, yellow and light blue (which are supposed to be favored by Satan). The colors to be imposed by law are expected to be black, brown, dark blue and dark gray.

Some Majlis members have been trying to lift the ban on green - which is, after all, the color of the Bani Hashem, the family of the Prophet Muhammad, and thus regarded as the color of Islam. The majority view, however, is that green is not "serious enough" to underline the gravity of a Muslim man's position.

Religious minorities would have their own color schemes. They will also have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faiths. Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes, while Christians will be assigned the color red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the color of their zonnar.

It is not clear what will happen to followers of other religions, including Hindus, Bahais and Buddhists - not to mention plain agnostics and atheists, whose very existence is denied by the Islamic Republic.

The new law imposes a total ban on wearing neckties and bow ties, which are regarded as "symbols of the Cross." Will Iranian Christians be allowed to wear them, nevertheless? No one knows.

The law also mandates the government to wage a campaign against "expensive attire" without defining it. Some mullahs, for example, wear robes made of pure hand-woven silk that cost several thousand dollars. Nor is it clear whether the kind of blouson that Ahmadinejad often wears would be deemed Islamic. (Shops in Tehran are selling the so-called "presidential" blouson for $3 apiece.)

One aim of the new law is to impose a total ban on imports of clothes and dress designs from the West. The Majlis hopes that all jeans will disappear form the Iranian scene within five years. The boutiques selling haute couture Western gear for men and women will also be closed over the next few years. A total ban on designer items, marked by logos, will come into force by the end of the year.

'There is no sense in a Muslim man or woman wearing something that is, in fact, an advertisement for an infidel designer or clothing merchant," says Pourhardani.

Another aim of the new law is to abolish the chador, the overall piece of cloth that Iranian women have tucked themselves in for centuries. The reason is that the chador existed before the Khomeinist revolution and thus cannot be regarded as "properly Islamic." Women must wear clothes that would, in fact, transform them into advertising billboards for the regime's ideology.

One remaining problem is to decide the age at which girls should wear the uniforms. At present, the hijab is mandatory from the age of 6. But some of Ahmadinejad's advisers want to reduce that to 4.

During the committee debates on the new law, some Majlis members tried to include articles determining the shape and size of men's beards and moustaches and impose an Islamic standard for male facial hair. But it was agreed that the issue be tackled in another bill to be presented to the Majlis next year.

By September, the Majlis is expected to approve an initial budget of $800 million to help "the poor and the needy" adopt the new uniforms. All public-sector workers, estimated to number 4.5 million, will be in uniform by 2009 at the latest.

What is already labeled "the Islamic clothes revolution" will not be limited to Iran. Tehran has already sent a team to Lebanon to inform the Hezbollah of the new law and train cadres to impose it on Lebanese Shiites.

"Our aim is to make sure that every Muslim, wherever he or she happens to be on this earth, is a living and walking symbol of Islam," says Pourhardani.

Amir Taheri was born in Iran and served as executive editor of Tehran's largest newspaper in the 1970s. Taheri, a columnist for The New York Post, has written numerous books on the Middle East. He is a member of Benador Associates.

US President George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, have received separate background briefings from Iranian opposition activists, including one visitor to the White House on Tuesday who caused a storm earlier this month by reporting Iran had passed a law requiring Jews to wear special identification.

Contacts at such a high level with Iranian opposition activists are likely to raise concerns in Tehran while the US and UK lead diplomatic efforts to get Iran to abandon its nuclear fuel programme.

White House officials said Amir Taheri, a London-based former editor, was among a group of experts invited to discuss Iraq and the region with Mr Bush.

Mr Taheri is well known for his support of the war in Iraq and regime change in Iran.

Iranian officials have denied reports, which originated from a commentary written by Mr Taheri, that a new law passed by the Iranian parliament would require non-Muslims to wear special badges.

Mr Taheri says he stands by his report.

In London, a UK spokeswoman confirmed that Mr Blair had met Iranian opposition activists for a “background briefing”.

She declined to say who had given the briefing, which she said was not a policy discussion.

The war in Lebanon pits an Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, against an American proxy, Israel. The meaning is clear: Iran is on the attack, and we have to fight back. The American right is finally ready to embrace this truth—while the left spins deeper into evasion.
Excerpt:
"What these commentators are picking up on is not an exact parallel to any one event of the 1930s—hence their scattershot of historical analogies. Instead, what they are picking up on is a sense of the overall direction of world events: we are clearly headed toward a much larger, bloodier conflict in the Middle East, but no one wants to acknowledge it, prepare for it, or begin to fight it….

"Whatever their other faults, commentators on the right…have demonstrated two important virtues: they are capable of learning from events—and they are eager to be on the forefront of opposition to dictatorship. They are starting to see that Iran is today’s equivalent to Nazi Germany—and they all want to be Churchill.

"The left also senses the impending war, but they have a very different reaction. Their favorite analogy is not the prelude to World War II, but the beginning of World War I.

"It is widely acknowledged that World War II was made far more horrible by the years in which free nations appeased Hitler, allowing him to strengthen his armies before he took over Europe. That analogy lends itself to one conclusion: the sooner we attack Iran, the better.

"World War I, by contrast, is widely regarded as the result of a giant, tragic mistake, a failure of diplomacy in which the great powers of Europe, seeking a network of alliances that would guarantee a 'balance of power,' instead trapped themselves into a senseless war…."

• The Suicide Bomb Society

by Robert Tracinski

Like East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War, Israel and the Palestinian territories are side-by-side laboratories—not for opposing political systems, but for opposing moral systems.

Excerpt:
"In early July, a poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media Communications Center found that 77% of Palestinians supported the Hamas kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the provocation that had recently led to a new Israeli offensive in Gaza. 'Significantly,' the Jerusalem Post noted, 'this high support for the abduction comes in spite of the fact that the majority of respondents…expect the crisis to end with losses incurred by the Palestinian side…. The poll also found that support for Hamas has increased despite international sanctions and the growing violence.'

"Such decisions are driven, not by any hidden ulterior motive or long-term strategic calculation, but by a simple moral imperative: the morality of self-sacrifice….

"As with the Cold War examples of East Berlin and West Berlin, the Palestinian territories and Israel offer side-by-side laboratories for opposing moralities.

"As in the Cold War, this side-by-side contrast is merely a microcosm for the contrast between two larger civilizations and their central powers: America on the one side, and Iran on the other…."

• Where Are We Going?

by Robert Tracinski

Two very different films, The Da Vinci Code and Art School Confidential, seemingly criticizing opposite ends of the contemporary cultural spectrum, both reveal the same thing about where our culture is—and isn't—going.

Excerpt:
"For two centuries, since the intellectuals' counter-revolution against the Enlightenment, we have been offered a false alternative: old-fashioned religious dogma—or 'modern' social subjectivism. The Da Vinci Code superficially rejects one half of that alternative, while Art School Confidential satirizes the other half. But neither one offers us a vision of the real alternative: a secular philosophy of reason.

"What does this imply about where our culture is going?..."

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